Lessons From The Counterculture Part 9/9: Escape from The Vampire Castle
Liberty vs Libertarianism & The Hydras of the Culture Wars
Note: this series is intended to be read in sequence, and this part makes references to personalties and concepts developed in the preceding parts.
As I write, in early 2024, a wave of campus protests are underway across American universities. Some of the campus protests have regrettably filed in behind some of the other Leftist campaigns in recent years in being unfocused, shallow and morally ambiguous. The tone is often predicated on a hierarchy of victimhood that refuses to acknowledge the tangled discrepancies of human life, in which every one of us can be both perpetrator and victim, but insists instead on dividing us between the two.
The judgement of the hierarchies in this case has been to endorse the slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel on October 7th, 2023. The response to the outrageous atrocities that the Israeli state is committing in Gaza has devolved into impotent noise, spectacle and hypocrisy.
Recent events in both the US and Europe have shown that a new, popular form of Fascism (and I am not being glib in the use of that word) is gathering strength and yet, both in America and in Britain, no positive, possible and unifying vision of a better future has managed to hoist itself up above the mass of bobbing heads and swinging fists in the culture wars, instead all we are offered are narcissistic demands and vacant slogans that scroll through our politics like angry TikToks.
In the absence of a persuasive, post-2008 vision that can, as Saul Alinsky warned the New Left, speak to the world as it is, all we have is the deranged mutations that torment our politics: the libertarian-authoritarian radical Right, with its identity politics of nationalism, xenophobic racism and religious atavism combined with free-market fundamentalism and anti-establishment populism; the moralising Left with its deeply alienating form of post-structuralist identity politics and accompanying denunciations of traitors and heretics.
These are the Hydras of the culture wars, and their common ancestor is Libertarianism. On the Right Libertarianism has produced the concept that the institutions of democracy themselves are a threat to freedom, a bizarre mythology in which freedom can only be restored by authoritarian Capitalists and their glorious defeat of a “globalist” conspiracy. The consequences of this worldview are obvious and troubling.
On the Left, Libertarianism has insinuated itself in a far less outlandish, and more convoluted, way. It’s chiefly expressed through the mechanisms of collective-individualism and narcissistic desire that we observed during the Counterculture, combined with “privatisation” of the type that Mark Fisher noted in Exiting The Vampire Castle. Here I think that the radical Left’s attitude towards prostitution serves as a useful case study.
The current position of the radical Left appears to be that prostitution should no longer be understood as exploitative. It has deployed, as is typical, a superficially meaningless and tautological slogan to make this point as belligerently as possible: “sex work is work”. The argument goes that prostitution should be understood as act of free agency, rather than as an act of exploitation, an individual choice no different from any other “legitimate” form of work and even, in some cases, emancipatory. I have some personal experience with the genealogy of this notion.
Back at the turn of the millennium I was at a meeting in Red Lion Square in central London. Red Lion Square was head office for the British Left, home to a grand, wood-panelled debating chamber with a stage from which leading Socialists would deliver speeches and a packed upper gallery from which trade union banners, activists’ flags and party logos fluttered; it was voluble and sweaty. I remember one evening when the hall was addressed by the English Collective of Prostitutes, who at the time were pressing for union recognition.
The aim of the collective was to decriminalise prostitution, it was felt by many on the Left at the time (although, I should stress, I don’t think the Collective saw it quite like this), that prostitutes were subject to a multi-layered series of injustices: first, sexual exploitation in the form of prostitution; second being treated as the criminal rather than the victim; third, social stigmatisation; fourth, and most important of all, being exposed to extreme physical danger by violent and predatory men; fifth, no protection from this danger could be expected from the police or the state.
The discussion at the time was concerned with what could be done to relieve these injustices, but always implicit within it was the ultimate goal of emancipating prostitutes from the seedy and exploitative business of prostitution. What started as an effort to mitigate the harms suffered by prostitutes, however, evolved over time into a series of justifications for prostitution itself.
It’s easy to see how this happened, in seeking to alleviate the social stigma and marginalisation experienced by prostitutes and relieve the exploitation, the Left adopted the line that there is nothing inherently wrong with prostitution and re-defined the axis of exploitation: “sex work”, no more or less exploitative than any other form of work, a matter of individual choice.
What’s interesting about the gentle movement in these waters, is the powerful ideological currents that pull beneath the surface. Without digressing into all the arguments around prostitution, it is not like other forms of work. In other work, the product of the worker’s labour is the commodity; in prostitution it is the person themselves, their body that is commodified, it is inherently exploitative. This is where we encounter Libertarianism, and return to Isiah Berlin’s concepts of liberty.
What has happened in relation to prostitution is that negative liberty (freedom from), and the project to emancipate prostitutes from the axis of their exploitation, has been supplanted by an emphasis on positive liberty (freedom to). This shift is an effort to reformulate prostitution as “sex work”, a matter of positive choice, which should be free of negative consequences, including the stigma that comes with describing it as misogynistic exploitation, to do otherwise would be to violate the privatised freedom of the individual subject.
This ideological pivot can be seen everywhere in the current positions of the Left, and in particular in its identity politics. These are the politics of individualism, of libidinal desire, solipsism and self-interest that we saw in the Beats, and Kesey’s Pranksters, and the Hippies and the Yippies; politics that belong to the ideology of the Right.
The commoditisation of everything under the rubric of “freedom”, free choice and individual agency, is precisely the fallacious political proposition of Capitalism. Capitalism loves the proposition that “sex work is work” - more to commodify, more to market, more to exploit. And if “sex work is work” what are pimps? We already have our answer: they are entrepreneurial businessmen, like Andrew Tate.
The Libertarian impulses on the Left, driven through identity politics, also work to channel the key ideological messages of Capitalism: “you can be whatever you want to be”, “you are unique”, “there is nothing holding you back”, “self-belief is the most important factor in success” and so on. As Fisher observed, “while in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour”.
The Counterculture of the 1960s provides us with a guide as to where this ideological confusion can lead. The misdirected expressions of individuality, the Port Huron Statement’s inability to articulate the ideal relationship between the individual and society, the Hippies’ emphasis on a politics of individual libidinal desire, which is, ultimately, the basis of capitalist ideology, the communal-individualism in which the communal space is fractured into identity groups and re-imagined as an extension of individual identity, all of this contributed, in my view, to the emergence on the Right of a radical form of the politics of individualism and privatisation in the form of Neoliberalism. And it’s perfectly logical that so many of the Countercultural Left became venture capitalists.
When Tom Hayden described the young leaders of the SDS who succeeded him as “not the conscience of a generation, but its id, finally surfacing”, he could have to some degree been summarising the whole of the Counterculture. We see this in the affinity between the Counterculture and the id in its pure form: the Hells Angels.
That desire to embrace the politics of feeling over reason, to endorse and legitimise all private individual desires and expressions of freedom, whatever they might be, obscures and distorts the task of building a better society. It is a desire that Robert Christgau characterised, in his description of the Angels, as belonging to “an American tradition…a notion of freedom that fails to carry with it the measure of social responsibility that I think ideally goes with freedom”.
A few years ago the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, while being interviewed by the talk show host Tavis Smiley, expanded on this concept:
“(in) American ideology there is a certain idea of personal freedom as the foundation of it, as a more old fashioned European, I think that you Americans sometimes tend to forget that, yes, personal freedoms are a wonderful thing – I do whatever I want, I walk wherever I want, I travel wherever I want – but in order for this to function we are aware of what extremely complicated level of laws, customs, manners has to be here in order to enable this. I found two wonderful symptoms of where maybe you got it wrong…when I enter an American hotel or any building, for you the ‘first floor’ is what for us Europeans is a ‘ground floor’, for us you climb to the first floor. Maybe this is what’s wrong with you, you don’t think that in order to count ‘one’, ‘two’, you need a ground – the ground will be precisely the network of social manners and so on….What in Europe we call in an old fashioned way ‘common ethical substance’ – the field of values, manners and so on, maybe you underestimate a little bit the weight of this. Maybe you accentuate in a wrong way the radical untouchable character of personal freedom, individual freedom. Now, again, I have nothing against it, what I’m saying is that brought to the end this attitude is self-destructive, because too much individual freedom…destroys human freedom itself”.
This is the paradox that was complicit in the defeat of the Counterculture and which rampages through our culture wars, it’s present in Mark Fisher’s tormented appeal in Exiting The Vampire Castle, it’s felt in the de-platforming, boycotting and hounding of apostates in politics and academia, it lurks malevolently in what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie described as “an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care… monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy”.
Post-68, when the Counterculture felt its defeat, the Left departed from a practical programme for social change, and headed into a symbolic politics of abstraction. I fear that this is where we have arrived again, what starts as political, the desire to remake society, becomes cultural, the desire to resist the cultural hegemony through alternative identities, and then personal, privatised, solipsistic, ever smaller, ever more distant from an authentic social project. In our contemporary politics this process of atomisation has been intensified by the context of our social relations and life online, in which the concept of society is further abstracted.
During his interview with Tavis Smiley, Žižek is pressed further by the host to explain his comments about American Freedom, he goes on to say:
“Your action of personal freedom does not take enough into account society. Society in the sense of the thick network of rules, customs…now I come to more refined points, and this will bring us to what I see as the failure of political correctness: not just the explicit, spoken, explicitly formulated rules, but especially those implicit rules, you know…. My fear of political correctness (is that) behind all this ‘respect of the other’ and so on, isn’t beneath it there a terrifying coldness? I look a woman in the eye one second too long – oh ‘visual rape’, I tell a dirty joke, ‘verbal rape’. And then I notice that their harassment is really a form of, maybe not hatred, but fear of the proximity of the other. Fear of harassment basically means ‘don’t come to close to me, I cannot tolerate your proximity’”.
As far back as the 1930s, W.H. Auden’s A Communist to Others addressed this type of introspective flight from the tangled and difficult web of social relations:
Unhappy poet, you whose only
Real emotion is feeling lonely
When suns are setting;
Who fled in horror from all these
To islands in your private seas
Where thoughts like castaways find ease
In endless petting:
You need us more than you suppose
And you could help us if you chose.
In any case
We are not proud of being poor
In that of which you claim a store:
Return, be tender; or are we more
Than you could face?
The Right has its own defeats and downturns, and it is plotting to avenge them, the old battles will have to be fought and won again. There are two urgent questions that confront our current moment: 1. How do we defeat the populist-nationalist Right? 2. How can we describe a post-Neoliberal world, beginning with the economy? That’s the doughnut, everything else is the hole.
The Left must emerge, blinking, from the darkness of the identi-camps to build a politics of consensus, based on common interests, reason, tolerance, materialism and material reality that speaks to the broad majority. It must articulate a new idea that is not based on narrow obsessions; it has to have a balanced and detailed understanding of histories and cultures, one that is not reduced to the hierarchies and politics of victimhood, and which understands that preparators and victims can share the same face, it needs to search for allies not heretics, its message must be unifying rather than divisive. Or the Hydras will devour us all.
End.
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